NYC ResistorWe learn, share, and make things2015-03-26T17:54:08Zhttp://www.nycresistor.com/feed/atom/WordPressMatthew Borgattihttp://har.ms/http://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75482015-03-26T17:54:08Z2015-03-26T17:54:08Z[...]]]>What is a soft robot anyway? Over the last few weeks I’ve been giving demos at Resistor to show students what they are, what they’re good for, and how you can make your own.

Resistor was host to two meetup groups: the ACM NYC Group and the Soft Robotics Technology Group. During the demonstrations I gave a brief overview of the state of the art in soft robotics and then went into how I designed and built my most popular soft robot to date: the Glaucus.

Students helped out by casting waxes, degassing silicone, and pouring up molds themselves. Maybe soon I’ll come up with a way to get an even more hands-on demo where people can each make a bot themselves to take home.

The Interactive Show is coming up faster than Big Dog on a graphene high! This year we’ve been musing over the future and our relationship between us our robot friends. So much of our imaginations have been shoehorned into narratives of subservience (Jetsons, the Matrix) or all-out war (Terminator, the Butlerian Jihad). Why not envision a future where we party hard with our robotic friends instead? This year, we’re calling all of Brooklyn’s finest interaction artists to portray the future, preferably with robots in it, through interactive art. Here’s some footage from last year’s show to give you an idea of what you’d be in for:

This year’s show will be May 30th. If you’re interested in being part of a show, drop us a line at ishow@nycresistor.com! Try to get in touch by April 26th so we can make sure there’s space for your project. Hope to hear from you soon!

We bottled our first ever wine at Resistor today. Two of our members and a couple of other folks in the community learned how to make basement wine from an honest to god bensonhurst italian.

We’ve only bottled the Monte Pulciano and the Merlot. Both came out great.

=D

]]>0hudsonhttps://trmm.nethttp://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75352015-03-20T14:57:30Z2015-03-20T13:52:44Z
NYC Resistor now has a Gopher site at gopher://gopher.nycresistor.com, although your web browser must be sufficiently standards compliant and/or hip to use it. One such browser is Lynx, shown here running on a Kaypro 2.
]]>0hudsonhttps://trmm.nethttp://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75332015-03-15T23:59:42Z2015-03-15T22:51:49Z[...]]]>
Next time you visit NYC Resistor, you might notice a new LED clock above the laser room door. It’s built with a surplus AMD1026 one-line LED display that has been re-brained with a SparkCore. Eventually we might take advantage of it being online to interface with the laser reservation system. For more details on interfacing with the hardware and the source code, check out trmm.net/SparkSign.
]]>0Bonnie Eisenmanhttp://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75302015-03-15T03:09:17Z2015-03-15T03:09:17Z[...]]]>Ignoring the Half-Tau Day heretics out there, we laser-etched some pies for Pi Day. This is a cranberry-orange meringue pie. Turns out the meringue etches beautifully! If you look closely at the pie you’ll notice that there are digits of pi forming the outline…

For those of you aching to find out more about NYC Resistor while surfing the arpanet on your mosaic browsers, fret not. We’ve got you covered. Now with our newly launched gopher services you can keep in touch with the modern era from the comfort of your golden age of technology and grand self delusion. We aim to please!

]]>0David Huertahttp://davidhuerta.mehttp://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75242015-03-05T02:24:44Z2015-03-05T02:24:44Z[...]]]>Managing private communication on the internet is a bit like space travel: It’s not impossible but the technology involved is difficult to use. Bring your laptop and your crypto-curiosity to Resistor on March 11th, 7:00pm for hands-on help with end-to-end secure email, anonymous web browsing, and general good practices for online privacy with folks that have been using this stuff for slightly longer than most. If you’re already an uber l337 cypherpunk and have a PGP key already, stick around for a key signing and probably some snacks!

]]>0Bonnie Eisenmanhttp://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75152015-03-04T02:52:15Z2015-03-03T21:58:32Z[...]]]>Lasers can make tasty treats. I spent some time last night with my friend Brenda Hiller (pictured here) experimenting with using the laser to caramelize colored sugar onto some chocolate tiles. Place a piece of chocolate into the laser (with something food-safe under it, of course), pour on some sugar, and then etch away. We were experimenting with what kinds of shapes we’d be able to etch.

The end result? The caramelized sugar sticks to the chocolate tiles, and it is super tasty. Full writeup and a few more photos on my blog.

]]>0David Huertahttp://davidhuerta.mehttp://www.nycresistor.com/?p=75102015-02-28T23:47:45Z2015-03-01T16:00:17Z[...]]]>For anyone using any of the APIs now under Google Cloud, I’ve recently launched an unconventional crowdfunding campaign to buy a month of Gold tier support ($400/month), which I plan to use not just for my own support requests, but yours too! It turns out there’s a lot of unanswered questions relating to APIs I might want to use in the future, and maybe you’re in the same boat.

I plan to pool our funds to send our support tickets to real live humans, first dibs for campaign backers, then onward to submit all the unanswered Google Cloud questions I can find using my Ticket Overflow extension for Chrome/Chromium, which I’ll also be releasing as part of the campaign. If you have any hot API probs, post them on Stack Overflow with the appropriate tags (gcloud, google-translate, google-cloud-platform, etc) and I’ll try to get answers for them. Ultimately, the more questions get answered, the easier it will be for other developers searching Stack Overflow to find API answers and make the internet just that much more useful!